I don’t own an iphone and it is very cumbersome to carry my laptop everywhere I go. When I get an inspiration I have to wait to get to my laptop to write it down but by then the idea has lost much of what I had in mind. If you can make an android app I believe it would be much appreciated by many of your users. Thanks
See this post: [url]https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/listed-in-the-verge-for-note-taking/42394/3]
Something I’d absolutely love would be some sort of “text editor app” that I could install on my Android phone (and also on my non-primary Windows machine), that would allow me to simply WRITE Scrivener-compatible notes.
I save everything to Dropbox. So it would be really easy to save the note into an existing Scrivener project structure. (I don’t know how easy it would be for Scrivener to detect the presence of a new note, and integrate it.)
That would make it easy to have a Scrivener machine for all the hard work. And a bunch of Scrivener-lite note taking machines wherever needed.
(I’m not sure this is the right place to post this. But hey.)
PS: I posted this as a response to a different post, but I think this thread is now relevant. Sorry about the cross-post.
Anything you write in an RTF editor (like WordPad on Windows) opens more-or-less fine in Scrivener (I’ve had some issues with highlights).
Have a look at File > Sync > with External Folder and check it out in the manual.
Mark
Like the other post said, use File > Sync > with External Folder and point that to a folder on Dropbox. Not only is this safer than editing the files directly, it lets you export them in a lot of different ways (I write in Markdown, so I export them as text files with a .md extension, and edit using JotterPad.), and it puts them in project order instead of creation order. Also, if you create a new file in that folder, apparently Scrivener will add it to the project in Drafts? Although I haven’t done that.
I recommend making a Scrivener Sync folder and putting each project in sub folders.
Then get a good Dropbox syncing app for Android…I use FolderSync Pro, but a lot of things work. Just plain FolderSync will work, I think. When you setup that folder in FolderSync, tell it to sync automatically overnight. So if you haven’t edited any today, you don’t even have to think about it. If you did…you need to go sync it first.
Or maybe get in the habit of pressing the sync buton (You can make a widget) a few minutes before you leave your house. Or sync it more if you don’t care about data. Or get Tasker and have it do the sync more often when plugged in and on your home wifi, like I do. (Perhaps there’s a better syncing app that does this itself?)
Also, tell FolderSync to watch for local changes and upload them in real time. This does waste some data (Although I remind everyone that text files are small.), but it’s better than the alternative of forgetting you made some changes on your phone, and running home to edit on your computer, and beating the sync from your phone. Then a week later you’re happily editing a file and are like ‘Wait, I already fixed this while I was out, where are those changes?’.
(If you screw that up in the other direction, if you fail to sync to your phone and edit old files there, and they get synced back into your project over newer stuff, Scrivener keeps a record of changes, so with some poking around, you can find what you overwrote. I’ve had to do this before. You can’t fix it in the other direction, though…if FolderSync overwrites a file on your phone, it’s gone. So you want all the change conflicts to make it to Scrivener…or at least Dropbox, although that involved fun poking around on their website to find past versions of files.)
And make good use of Snapshots in Scrivener, so you can roll back if you forget to sync like @DAVIDTC says!
Mark
Using Dropbox and the sync function is a really good idea! 
I still have a problem, though. Is it possible to sync notes and comments? I rely heavily on notes when I write… 
Thank you!
Wow! Thanks for these truly useful answers!
I apologise profusely for not having said anything before now! I logged into the forum to see if there was anything interesting, and saw that my posts had responses. I seem to have not ticked the “notify me” checkbox when I originally posted. So I just forgot that my posts existed in the first place.
Thanks so much. I’m going to implement things!
Three quick questions regarding the SYNC system…
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In SCRIVENER itself, do I need to do the sync manually, or will it do it automatically?
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On my Android phone, do I need to use an app such as FOLDER SYNC, or can I use the DROPBOX app?
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When I’m working on something on my Android phone (for example, a chapter of my novel), do I work on the existing file for that item, or do I create a new one, assuming an abundance of caution is the right way to go?
Thanks muchly.
Blue skies
Roy
- Manually, while the project is open. But when you set up sync you’ll find a setting (which should be on by default), to automatically sync when opening and closing.
- I don’t know the answer to that one, but presumably anything that can sync a folder full of text files to your device and let another thing edit them (or even that same thing may do the syncing).
- Either! If you create new files, use the same file format as the rest (so .txt if that is what you use, or .rtf, etc.). New files will be imported into the project automatically, and be managed by sync from that point on.
Thanks so much, Amber! Much appreciated!
I made a shortcut for syncing in scrivener and use it before i close my laptop. this just saves me time as far as opening and closing docs. but i haven’t found any good text editors to use that allow me to change to bold or italics and have those changes carry back to the main doc.
i really came here to say that a barebones text editor with the ability to write and format text (italics, bold, underline, bullets) that is dedicated to scrivener would still be most appreciated.
This is why I exclusively use Markdown to write, as it works everywhere. But that aside, it does surprise me that there is not a single good RTF editor for Android! The comments made earlier in this thread seemed to suggest that wasn’t the case.
I’m sorry, but that makes no sense on multiple levels. We’d have to delay Windows v3 well into 2021 to do that, which would make those waiting for v3 very angry. And then, for all of our efforts, we’d end up in the exact same position we’re trying to get out of: we’d have this massive gap between iOS and Android, and years of having to say, “some day we will achieve parity”.
Very late follow-up here, but if you’re making formatting changes like this, also make a textual change to the document. Simply changing the formatting alone isn’t enough to trigger the sync. I’m not sure that’s the problem you’re seeing (I don’t edit on my phone so I don’t have experience these days with the RTF-based apps available on Android and what their quirks might be), but I do work with the external folder sync regularly and often just am editing comments on the doc, which likewise won’t trigger a sync, so I’ve gotten in to habit of also adding a “commented” line at the top of the main text to be sure it all syncs over as expected. The same would work for formatting changes, when that’s all you’re doing.